seamlessCARE Ltd, a University College Dublin (UCD) digital health spin-out company, recently announced that it has secured a total of €700,000 in seed funding from angel investor and former HSE chairman Dr Frank Dolphin and Enterprise Ireland.
The funding will enable seamlessCARE to accelerate the roll-out of its innovative assistive technologies. seamlessCARE’s products are focused on enhancing communication and support the care of people with autism, acquired brain injury, dementia, intellectual disability and a wide range of other conditions.
The company’s first product, Empathic, helps non-verbal people to communicate their emotions. It records up to 10 seconds of a non-verbal person’s vocalisation. Then it uses artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret how that person is feeling. The app/API has been trained to identify up to 10 emotions, including happy, sad, excited and frustrated.
seamlessCARE was co-founded in 2021 by Dr Aviva Cohen, Ian Kennedy and Dr Çağrı Çubukçu. A spin-out from the UCD School Mechanical and Materials Engineering the company was established with the support of NovaUCD following the completion of Enterprise Ireland commercialisation funding.
Dr Aviva Cohen, CEO and co-founder, seamlessCARE said, “We are delighted to have closed this seed funding round and secured the backing and support of Enterprise Ireland and angel investor Frank Dolphin. Frank is a well-known businessman and entrepreneur in the health sector and a chartered psychologist by profession and we are already learning so much from his wealth of experience. We now look forward to rolling out our range of assistive technologies to improve the lives of individuals with complex needs and those who provide their care and support.”
She added “Our first product Empathic enables non-verbal people to independently communicate their feelings. We are now running a closed Beta test and we welcome new participants, to sign-up just visit our website, seamlesscare.ie. The feedback from testers so far has been fantastic and we are rapidly progressing towards an open Beta version. Later this year Empathic will become available through the Apple app store and Google Play where families and institutions can purchase low-cost subscriptions. They include a version of the app to share with everyone who interacts with the non-verbal person.”
Dr Frank Dolphin said, “The seamlessCare team are ambitious for their business while genuinely wanting their technology to improve outcomes for others. I’m delighted to support this dynamic young company.”
The company is also accelerating the development of a second product called Focus. This is a video-based care planning API, accompanied by a user-friendly mobile app. It enables carers to record short videos of daily activities, take notes, send alerts and update written care plans from any device, quickly and easily.
Focus supports the care of people who cannot easily communicate their own needs and is built on the HL7 FHIR Framework. This means that it is interoperable so each user’s information can be relayed instantly to any health provider, anywhere in the world.
Empathic and Focus are the first of a pipeline of technologies being developed by the seamlessCARE team. Next year the company plans to start releasing products that further promote respect, safety and efficiency in chronic care facilities.
seamlessCARE completed the 2020 UCD VentureLaunch Accelerator Programme run by NovaUCD to support the launch of new start-ups emerging from the University.
